Timeline for Paying people not to vote at all
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:20 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Feb 25, 2019 at 7:36 | vote | accept | Alexei | ||
| Feb 17, 2019 at 14:29 | comment | added | The Mattbat999 | Overall it is a bad idea to tell people thwir vote doesn't matter. It can hurt a democracy if only a relatively few number of people there vote | |
| Feb 15, 2019 at 21:06 | comment | added | CactusCake | winning by 5,000 votes is no different than winning by 5,001 or 4,999 so why not take the money instead? - because you don't know what the margin is until the results are in. And even if you did know, adding this incentive could (would) change the margin, because you don't know how many people will partake. E.g.If the margin is 5000 and this financial incentive to abstain convinces 5001 voters from the (currently) winning side who were all thinking "well my measly one vote won't change anything because we'll still win with a 4999 lead" then suddenly the result flips. | |
| Feb 15, 2019 at 8:53 | comment | added | komodosp | @Roy I think the point is that there is no single "deciding vote" unless a candidate wins by one vote, which is highly unlikely. That being the case any individual voter may consider their own vote worthless, certainly compared to the money they will be paid for abstaining, even if it's a very low amount - i.e. the outcome of the election will be the exact same whether or not I vote, so why do I not just take the money? | |
| S Feb 15, 2019 at 7:08 | history | suggested | V2Blast | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fixed header formatting (for accessibility)
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| Feb 15, 2019 at 6:05 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Feb 15, 2019 at 7:08 | |||||
| Feb 15, 2019 at 0:48 | comment | added | Princess Ada | And yes, this is also true under normal circumstances - my candidate will win or lose whether I bother to vote or not, so why waste time and the petrol costs to go out and vote? Still, increasing the costs of voting will exacerbate the problem further. | |
| Feb 15, 2019 at 0:45 | comment | added | Princess Ada | @Roy By “Aggregate” I mean that there is no single vote that pushes it over the line, it’s the sum total of all the votes that matter. In almost every case one individual unilaterally choosing not to vote will have no impact on the final result - winning by 5,000 votes is no different than winning by 5,001 or 4,999 so why not take the money instead? It’s a Tragedy of the Commons thing where individual benefits outweigh collective costs, so the individually rational choice leads to disaster when everyone takes it. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 22:15 | comment | added | David Schwartz | I don't think your point about low turnout is legitimate. If the turnout is low, that means that few people thought it was worth voting for the winner. So any evidence that the public supports their policies would be bogus, it would just show that they preferred those policies a bit over the other choices. It seems like one could argue that it would make the sense of having a mandate more accurately reflect the facts of the support for the policies. (That said, the fact that this would more heavily disincentivize poor people makes it a non-starter, IMO.) | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 22:05 | comment | added | RWW | This doesn't answer the question, which is "Is there a theory, a study, paper etc. to provide more insight about such an approach to voting?" | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 22:04 | comment | added | DarthFennec | @Roy "At some point there is a vote that determines which candidate wins and which ones lose." That doesn't make sense to me. If candidate X has 63 million votes and candidate Y has 66 million, and any one of those votes was removed, the outcome wouldn't change. So there is no "deciding vote". Even in the case of a tiebreaker, where one vote does determine the result, there's no reason that any of the votes should be considered "deciding" over any of the rest, since if any vote was different it would change the outcome. None of the votes matter individually, only in aggregate. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 19:51 | comment | added | OganM | You can offer tax cuts for non voting so rich people would be more incentivized instead. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 17:47 | history | notice added | Philipp♦ | Needs citation | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 17:45 | comment | added | Philipp♦ | While these are all very good reasons why this isn't a good idea, please note that the question specifically asked for "online resources about this idea" and "a theory, a study, paper etc." | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 17:27 | comment | added | Cloud | I already get paid not to vote. I don't waste an hour of my time doing it and the many hundreds of hours doing the homework to make an informed decision. So I "get paid" thousands in my time, which others happily relinquish. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 16:41 | comment | added | Aaron | The unbalanced incentives section is hardly different than what already exists. Some non-voters don't vote because they already feel that way. On the other hand, you don't have the aggregate that you speak of if everyone uses the logic you put forth; which, again, is already part of current voting turnout. A similar problem is when everyone all says "I don't vote for a 3rd party candidate because nobody else does so my vote would not matter. That is why I vote for a main party." Logic similar to yours is a large part of why we are stuck with a 2 party system. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 15:28 | comment | added | Roy | -1 I don't get the point about aggregate voting. At some point there is a vote that determines which candidate wins and which ones lose. It's impossible to know whether your vote is the deciding vote, so how can any individual determine whether their vote is the one that 'matters' or not, and thus choose whether to vote or take the money? | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 13:05 | comment | added | Alexei | +1. I find "poor people" issue the most problematic. The cost issue can be partially circumvented by requiring voters to explicitly request for payment per non-vote. If they are simply not interested in voting at all, they do not get payed. | |
| Feb 14, 2019 at 10:17 | history | answered | Princess Ada | CC BY-SA 4.0 |